Wednesday, November 7, 2012

MetaData Extractor 0.3 in KDE Review

since a week I have moved the current MetaData Extractor into KDE Review and tagged it with 0.3. As you might have read, Jason moofang already blogged about his anime changes in the extractor plugins.

A few things that changed in my side since the last release:

Limit the background processes that will fetch the data at the same time

Disable the Nepomuk2::Service on first run.This means the user has to activate it in the KCM to make it work and it won't fetch data for all files once it is installed

Allow to specify which resource types should be used in the automatic fetching (documents, videos, music)

Add a general configuration KCM to the system settings module

Save not processed queries on kde shut down and start them again next time

Added a docbook to explain most parts of the UI

Fix several bugs and crashes

Allow to restrict online searches to preferred plugins only and not fetch all the other plugins if the lookup failed

In its current state the extractor respects the users privacy as much as possible and can still be configured to do all its magic in the background. Beside the service changes it is always possible to start the extractor from the Dolphin service menu manually.

Another thing that will change is the name of the program.

When I've started this project (mostly as a helper for conquirere) there was already a project named Nepomuk WebExtractor in playground. As it seems this project is dead, the name will be available again.

The name MetaData Extractor might be misleading too. This program does not extract information from files (other than filename analysing for better search parameters) but only rather find additional data on the Internet.

What I propose:1. Upon startup, search metadata for all resources (files) in the list. The GUI should still be responsive. (If this is too hard to implement, it could be skipped.)2. Automatically select the first match.3. "Fetch Metadata" button will fetch _and_ save metadata to file.

The new workflow would then be: Fetch Metadata -> Next -> (repeat).

Another idea that I'm unsure about myself is to replace "Next" with "Fetch Metadata" and put a "Skip" button to the right of it. When you've fetched metadata, the button would turn into "Next", thus making it unnecessary to move the mouse at all unless you have to change the search.